In September 2020 I had my first “viral” tweet (271,000 impressions, 22,000 engagements). For me (who had about 100 followers at this time) it was big enough.

The tweet (below) was me asking for recommendations for follow-on books given how profound an impact Antifragile by Nicholas Taleb had on me. It seems that when a book resonates with other people as much as it resonated with me means that they are all too willing to give recommendations.

Given the interest in this, I thought I’d collate and summarise the recommendations to give a top 10 (as curated by Twitter) list of Antifragile follow-on books.

The Top 10 Recommended Books in Order

(Curated by the Twitter-verse, summarised by me)

1. Incerto by Nicholas Taleb (2001-2018)
   • Unsurprisingly the vast majority of recommendations were for the other books in the Incerto body of work by Taleb. This is a group of five books (with Antifragile being one of them) on philosophically explorations on uncertainty. The Incerto series comprises:
   • Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (2001)
   • The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007)
   • The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)
   • Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012)
   • Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (2018)
   • Bonus geek recommendation for Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails (2020)
2. The (mis)behaviour of markets**: **a fractal view of risk, ruin, and reward by Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard L. Hudson (2004)
3. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (2011)
4. Moral Letters to Lucilius (also known as Letters from a Stoic) by Seneca (65 AD)
5. The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934) and Conjectures and Refutations (1963) by Karl Popper
6. The Iliad (762 BC) and The Odyssey (700 BC) by Homer
7. A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market by Ed Thorp (2016)
8. Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova (2013)
9. Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard (1981)
10. Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense by Rory Sutherland (2019)

All Other Recommended Books

This is a long list… brace yourself. These are in alphabetical order, first listing the general recommended Authors, then against specific Title recommendations.

Recommendations of Authors

11. Aquinas
12. Aristotle
13. Aurelius
14. Boethius
15. Burke, Edmund
16. Gigerenzer, Gerd
17. Hayek
18. Hume
19. Ledeen, Michael
20. Marks, Howard
21. Popper
22. Seneca
23. Spinoza
24. Wittgenstein

Recommendations of Books

25. 12 Rules for Life by Peterson
26. A Brief History of Time by Hawking
27. A Gift to my Children by Jim Rogers
28. A New Kind of Science by Wolfram
29. Adults In The Room by Yanis Varoufakis (about Greece’s “negotiations” with the EU who wilfully destroyed his country’s economy)
30. **Algorithms to Live By **by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
31. **Blink **by Malcolm Gladwell
32. Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
33. **Candide **by Voltaire
34. Cellular Automata and Complexity by Wolfram
35. Cotton, Climate and Camels by Bulliet
36. Crete 1941 by Beevor
37. Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another by Philip Ball
38. Demon of our own Design by Richard Bookstaber
39. Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker
40. Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence by Daniel Goleman
41. Strategy: A History by Freedman
42. Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
43. **Hyperspace **by Michio Kaku
44. I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter
45. La Casa de Bernarda Alba by Lorca
46. Lazarus in the Multiple by Camaren Peter
47. Life 3.0 by Tegmark
48. Making Habits, Breaking Habits: Why We Do Things, Why We Don’t, and How to Make Any Change Stick by Jeremy Dean
49. **Mediterranean **by Braudel
50. Mind is Myth by Krishnamurti
51. Modelling Extremal Events: for Insurance and Finance (Stochastic Modelling and Applied Probability) by Claudia Klüppelberg, Paul Embrechts, and Thomas Mikosch
52. Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer
53. Our Mathematical Universe by Tegmark
54. Permaculture: A Designers Manual by Bill Mollison
55. Political Theology by Carl Schmitt
56. Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
57. **Salambo **by Flaubert
58. Seeing like a State by James C. Scott
59. Six Easy Pieces by Feynman
60. Start with Why by Sinek
61. Stocks for the Long Run by Jeremy Siegel
62. Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn
63. The Biggest Bluff by Maria Konnikova
64. The Case of the Missing Neutrinos by John Gribbin
65. The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene
66. The End of Average by Todd Rose
67. The Evolution of Everything by Matt Wridley
68. The Flaw of Averages by Sam Savage
69. The Goal by Goldratt (practical application about how to make systems more antifragile)
70. The Grand Design by Hawking
71. The Gray Rhino: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore by Michele Wucker
72. The Lessons of History by Will Durant
73. The Manuscript Found In Saragossa by Potocki
74. The Marshmallow Test by Walter Mischel
75. The Organized Mind by Levitin
76. The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense by Gad Saad
77. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard Feynman by Richard Feynman
78. The Power of Habit by Duhigg
79. The Ride of a Lifetime by Bob Ilger
80. The Skin by Malaparte
81. The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing by Michael Mauboussin
82. Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows (to help understand what leads to fragility in nature)
83. Top Dog by Bronson and Merryman
84. Two Oxen Ahead by Halstead
85. **What Do You Care What Other People Think? **by Richard Feynman
86. What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars by Brendan Moynihan and Jim Paul
87. When Genius Failed by Lowenstein
88. White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo
89. **Willpower **by John Tierney and Roy Baumeister

Recommended Books by Taleb Himself

The article linked below is a list of 61 books recommended by Taleb himself.

https://fs.blog/2012/02/book-recommendations-from-nassim-taleb/

Closing thoughts

What amused me was there were several comments related to ==“stop reading, start doing”==! I love this! With suggestions to take action ranging from writing a book I’d like to read to stock trading. I like this counter challenge and do think that Taleb would agree too! I’ve made a start by writing this post! 🙌

The final blindingly-obvious observation is that older books are of course more antifragile - the Lindy Effect! (If this means nothing then all the more reason to read Antifragile - it’s all in there). This is why I’ve put the first published date again each book.

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